Republican News · Thursday 3 October 2002

The American Dream?

Nickled and Dimed

On (Not) Getting by in America

By Barbara Ehrenreich

240pp, Granta, £8.99

"You thought it would be simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping."

Almost 70 years after George Orwell's observations were published in Down and Out in Paris and London, poverty remains a complex and unattractive subject. Our celebrity-obsessed media rarely ventures into the parallel universe of the terminally unglamorous, to see how the other half live, to lay bare the grim banality of a breadline existence.

Inspired by the rhetoric of welfare reform in the US during the 1990s and the political promise that all the poor need is a job to work themselves out of poverty, journalist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich spent four months doing low skilled jobs, to find out whether people can actually survive on a wage of 7 dollars an hour, as millions of Americans must.

Describing herself as a newly divorced homemaker returning to the labour market, Ehrenreich steps out of her upper middle class world to take on the challenge of living on the minimum wage. Moving from Florida to Maine and on to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaner, nurse's aide and shop assistant. Ehrenreich quickly discovered the sheer exhaustion of working in the service industry, where waitresses work seven hours without a break, where maids doing hard physical labour are forbidden a glass of water and forced to "work through pain" and where sales assistants can be fired for trying to organise a union.

She suffers bullying managers, spying householders, rude customers, the humiliation of mandatory drug testing, back pain and skin rashes but soon realises that one wage wouldn't cover her bills and is forced to take a second job, as an estimated 7.8m others do in the US, getting by on a diet of coffee and painkillers.

Her description of the search for affordable accommodation is a salutary tale.

In Key West, Florida, she worked as a waitress and couldn't even afford to live on a caravan site: "It is a shock to realise that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic to aspire to," she writes. Living in motel rooms soon eats into her meagre income and highlights the trap that those on minimum wages find themselves. Too poorly paid to save for a deposit on an apartment, they are forced to pay high weekly rents to live in overcrowded motel rooms with no cooking facilities, which in turn forces them to shell out for convenience food, thus eating up their take home pay. And these are the lucky ones. She was horrified to discover that a number of her co-workers at the restaurant where she worked were living in their cars in an effort to survive.

Admitting that her investigation could never tell her what it was really like to live in poverty, without hope of respite - "I was only visiting a world that others inhabit full-time" - she is nevertheless shocked at the world she discovers, a world where she couldn't even afford to buy discounted clothes from the Wal-Mart store she worked in. A simple thing such as buying work trousers is enough to knock her budget off kilter, she fails to live on her weekly wages, even while holding down two jobs.

Ehrenreich has an observant, at times academic yet sympathetic style of writing. It's the small details of the daily grind that stand out best - the frustrations of cleaning houses on a ration of one bucket of clean water per house, the bizarre personality tests job applicants have to take; the anti-union video shown to new Wal-Mart staff.

So is it possible to live, like 30 per cent of the US population, on under $8 an hour?

Barbara Ehrenrich concludes that it is not. She discovers that a job is not automatically a way out of poverty and that she, as a healthy, single, middle-class, white, native English speaker, is no better able to survive on poverty wages than the people she worked with.

Ehrenreich describes a world where companies intimidate their employees, through drug tests, surveillance and public admonishments, into quiescent acceptance of their meagre lot and where workers are so busy surviving there is little time or energy to fight for change. This is a world where the classic economic argument that the market, through supply and demand, sets prices belies the reality that the current skills shortage in America has not increased wages at the lower end of the labour market. This is a world where companies invest millions to keep wages deflated, preferring to spend money on constant recruitment, surveillance and overpaid CEOs rather than on decent wages for front line staff.

Nickled and Dimed is a witty, accurate portrayal of the plight of the working poor in America. Ehrenreich's analysis of current attitudes about who the working poor are, and why they can't pull themselves up by the apocryphal bootstraps, is thought provoking and insightful. There are obvious parallels with Irish society, where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and where the economic benefits of recent years have been squandered, with 25% of the recent budget benefits going to the richest 10%.

Companies, not politicians, are the prime movers in shaping the laws and regulations of nations. They lobby public representatives, asserting that what benefits a big corporation benefits us all. But does it? Countries like Ireland talk about making it easy for companies to do business here; about attracting inward investment; about staying corporate-friendly. But there is little discussion at the cabinet table about ensuring that holding down a job pays, about eliminating the high rates of relative poverty that threatens to strip away the social fabric of working class communities.

If Mary Harney and the PDs get their way, and Irish society becomes closer to Boston than Berlin, read this book and see what the future holds for Irish workers.

BY KERRY LAWLESS